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Racial diversity will be the most defining and impactful characteristic of the millennial generation. Millennials between ages 18 and 34 are now synonymous with America’s young adults, fully occupying labor force and voting ages. They comprise 23 percent of the total population, 30 percent of the voting age population, and 38 percent of the primary working age population. Among racial minorities their numbers are even more imposing. Millennials make up 27 percent of the total minority population, 38 percent of voting age minorities, and a whopping 43 percent of primary working age minorities. [Note: contains copyrighted material].

Two years ago, Pew Research Center found that Republicans and Democrats were more divided along ideological lines than at any point in the previous two decades. But growing ideological distance is not confined to partisanship. There are also growing ideological divisions along educational and generational lines. Highly educated adults, particularly those who have attended graduate school, are far more likely than those with less education to take predominantly liberal positions across a range of political values. And these differences have increased over the past two decades. [Note: contains copyrighted material].

The term “school-to-prison pipeline” has become a powerful metaphor to capture the processes by which children, typically low-income children of color, are pushed out of school and into the criminal justice system. While exact definitions of suspension and expulsion vary across states and school districts, it is clear that what were intended to be last resort and occasional disciplinary tools have become wildly overused and disproportionately applied to children of color, resulting in dramatically negative long-term effects. [Note: contains copyrighted material].

It’s hard to talk about race. Fear of saying the wrong thing, fear of expressing an unpopular view or simply the fear of offending others can dampen honest conversations about racial attitudes. Accurately measuring racial attitudes faces another formidable obstacle. Psychologists say that biased racial views are sometimes buried deep in a person’s subconscious, the byproducts of exposure to popular culture, the media and other factors. An Implicit Association Test (IAT), a technique that psychologists say measures subconscious or “hidden” bias by tracking how quickly individuals associate good and bad words with specific racial groups, was used for the report. [Note: contains copyrighted material].

May 17 is the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision that prohibited Southern states from segregating schools by race. The Brown decision annihilated the “separate but equal” rule, previously sanctioned by the Supreme Court in 1896, that permitted states and school districts to designate some schools “whites-only” and others “Negroes-only.” More important, by focusing the nation’s attention on subjugation of blacks, it helped fuel a wave of freedom rides, sit-ins, voter registration efforts, and other actions leading ultimately to civil rights legislation in the late 1950s and 1960s. But Brown was unsuccessful in its purported mission, to undo the school segregation that persists as a central feature of American public education today. The issue brief highlights key elements of the American education system that have evolved in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. [Note: contains copyrighted material].

The share of mothers who do not work outside the home rose to 29% in 2012, up from a modern-era low of 23% in 1999, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of government data. This rise over the past dozen years represents the reversal of a long-term decline in “stay-at-home” mothers that had persisted for the last three decades of the 20th century. [Note: contains copyrighted material].

According to the report, a quiet policy transformation is taking place in Europe, as policymakers increasingly turn to a strategy of “mainstreaming” immigrant integration, seeking to reach people with a migration background through needs-based social programming and policies that also target the general population. The report assesses mainstreaming efforts across government in Denmark, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. [Note: contains copyrighted material].